And so, naming, in setting out to complete this task, rather than quitting OR starting, shall do BOTH. The kicking first, and it is an ongoing process(ion).


<***************

Smoking is great because you get to pretend to be a dragon.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be George,

...not the bloody dragon.

1) Cut the Squares

As we all know, smoking is a fabulous addiction. The ferocious disregard for one's well-being is heartening, fearless, and transcendingly tough. It is the perfect way to kill time.

Instant gratification is easy and insidiously self-perpetuating; this is a fairly glorious example of I want it—I can give it to myself. Bother with the consequences. Here is what my lungs look like:




They feel that rich and silty too.

At some point I heard it was a good idea to not smoke, so I thought, sure, why not, I'll give it a try.

But then, for some reason, it seemed I never really actually wanted to try.

I lasted a week, once, after a hitchhiking- and sensory-related disaster of perspective in Italy-via-Denmark. But that is a whole other tale, and suffice to say, thinking that cows and cuckoo birds (literally) are communicating with you and the only way to silence them--at least momentarily--is to undertake some sort of self-flagellating action, which to me at the time meant: Quit smoking, or you will continue to be assailed by the inner voices of the picturesque landscape... Well, it's not ideal.

Here is the only picture I retained from that:



Three (or so) years later, after living in the American Southeast (the perennial bastion for United States Tobacco Smoking/Chewing/Sniffing, where grandparents, clergy, doctors, cartoon characters, news anchors, statues, pack mules, infants, and astronauts will still gallantly bum you a cigarette), I found myself back in the Pacific Northwest, and desiring to quit.

I was feeling my clock ticking, or something of the sort. I think a roommate was trying to have a kid, or suchlike, and contemplating the same--kicking the smokes. She didn't do either of those things (godspeed, darling), but I wanted to quit, and was failing miserably.

The quitting process would usually last about twenty minutes, between the time I rolled up the absolute last pinch of Bali and when I'd bike over to Knott Street Grocery to buy more.

Realizing I was too dumb to just do this for my own well-being, I decided I needed to make a plan. I only came up with the first step really, but I figured I would take it from there, and see where it took me.

The Plan
Step #1: Get Sick

Despite my avid smoking tendencies, whenever I would get sick I basically could not smoke. I didn't want to, I physically and pyschologically couldn't make myself do it if my throat was illness-sore. I decided that it would be necessary to take advantage of this to proceed.



Here is how I went about it. I had just been through another hilariously ineffective spin of "wanting to stop", followed by a caving of will which necessitated my trekking through ever-so-rare PDX snow-drifts to get more tobacco. A friend of mine kinda mysteriously was not about for few days, and when I saw him pop up online I sought to find out what was up. He said he had been/was violently ill, only today even able to get out of bed and do such non-demanding activities as hold down an instant message chat. I suggested we hang out, and overrode his pressing concern that I may get ill myself from exposure to his physically beleaguered person. Nonsense! I said, Do not worry about me. We got together, had some food, and then I got wildly ill.

Bedridden, feverish, dehydrated, collapsing, hallucinatory, et cetera... My appetite for smoking was adequately dampened, and on one of my few trips upright, I managed to throw my remaining tobacco away in the trashcan in my room. I began to bury it in tissue bursting with phlegm and acid-green mucus, but it was still there. At this juncture, still fairly early in my illness, I decided to move to the next phase of the plan which had just occurred to me...

The Plan
Step #2: Meditate on Death

(Attack Your Own Mind/Illogical Thought Patterns)

With my physical addiction temporarily unhinged, I decided to start a psychological campaign. Being base and dog-like, I took note from my elementary psych classes and set about attempting to (re)condition myself.



At length, as methodically as my fevered mind would allow, I dwelt in a plane of mortification, dissecting and mentally parading through every personal embarrassment, misstep, dishonesty, maleficence, cowardice, and selfish action I could conjure up out of my past, and in my physical duress, I paired them with smoking. The epitome of my idiocy, the crown of my carelessness, there it was. How dumb am I? Very.

And what else, for good measure? Death. I thought about (cap dee) Death, and all the stupid shit I had done, and I mated it up with smoking, and I piled bodily fluids encased in Kleenex on top of my bag of smokes there in my trashcan in my room.

I took care to linger on a strikingly pathetic scenerio: How Sad I Would Feel For Myself And How Dumb I Would Feel When It Happened. Facing down the possibility of short-circuiting myself and then having to wallow around in it whilst I was processed through a self-inflicted bodily deterioration and failure... well, it was dancing through my skull like sugarplums.

As incredibly lame as it is, more than anything, I just don't want things to be my fault. This (killing myself slowly with full knowledge and not enough willpower or wherewithal to stop it) was going to be (may still be) the horrific, delicious irony of my life. I don't want to cause it myself, but I have set myself on my way...

So, there I was, too sick to read, no Tv, no movies, no music, no absurd friends who wanted to hang with me and get deathly ill. So I thought about it, dying. Intensely, and with purpose. For ten days. In bed for ten days and nothing but thinking myself away from all else.

I never want to die...
or at least, I don't want it to be my own fault.
Harrowing, that was.

When I got up, the next part of the plan dawned on me, and I headed for the wretched grotesquerie that was my undisposed-of trash...

The Plan
Step #3: Be a Hypocrite

(Or: Live in a World of No Absolutes)

I hadn't had the will or bodily power to get rid of the trash for ten days, and it was at this point, when I was finally motive and able to do so, that I decided my next rule would be: Make No Forbidden Fruit, Lest Ye Want It.



By this time my trash had graduated to a completely full 30-gallon industrial black bag of nasty, and I proceeded to dig down through ten days of horrible and retrieve a what-was-most-certainly much-befouled pouch of tobacco. I was not oblivious to the sad idiocy of my action, and after about five minutes of staring at it there on my desk, I made a decision. I would keep my new rule, allowing no absolutes, permitting an occasional...

I threw the pouch back into the trash bag and then set about gathering up the mountains of thoroughly sopping and/or crusted-over Kleenex which I had emptied out everywhere on my floor during my mindless excavation. I went to bed, and the next day felt well enough to leave the house.

The Plan
Step #4: Distraction

( Alter Your Environment )

Upon leaving the house the following morning, I immediately ran in to my landlord, who lived in the lower quarters of my house. It was rather unexpected for me, as she was generally out of the country (jazz vocalist, southeast Asian hotel bar-style), and I hadn't realized she was back.

We had a quick exchange of pleasantries, and she mentioned that her stay in town would be brief, she was driving to Florida the next morning. Facing 50+ hours of driving alone, she jokingly asked if I wanted to come with. She said she would fly me back.

I said yes. I had her set me up with a week in San Diego after three in Florida, via some ridiculous amount of CCard Airline Miles. Ten hours later we left. In four or five days (I can't remember which), we did this:


3139 miles

I only drive about two-three times a year. I don't really know how to drive stick, so she shifted for me and told me when to let go of the clutch till we could get on the highway and I could leave it in the high gear for four-five hours in a row.

I was gnawing the inside of my mouth throughout. It turned days into drone. Two years earlier I went on a similar trip and I took 3,000 photographs. Taken on the first night out of town, this is the only picture I snapped during the next four weeks of travel:

I have only been outside in the open in Wyoming for a total of 30 minutes in my life. All of them, on a Sunday, in a Wal-Mart parking lot. We had bikes on the back of the car and were taking turns going in to pee. I wandered around our car doing my gotta-pee dance, noting the array of mullets, pickups, and gay-bashing bumperstickers. Within ten minutes I was bent over the hood of a K-9 unit in the middle of the parking lot, getting a thorough pat-down from an officer who had been alerted to the scene by some noble local concerned with my appearance in a place I clearly did not belong. I was wearing a frilly hood. I had a camera the officer had me walk him through. And I still had to pee, torrentially. The cop was hot, and nice to me eventually...



I stayed with my grandparents, who I had always hidden my smoking from, in one of those Florida trailer villages. I slept on friends' couches and family floors. I saw manatees and eagerly heard out my grandfather's screed against Thomas Alva Edison, thief extraordinaire. Dolphins, Alligators, Strip-Malls, Swimming. Started getting sick again--a totally tame cold, but I certainly didn't want to smoke. My grandmother took me to B&N to buy reading material for the road. A present of War and Peace for me, this thing (Going Rogue) for her; grinding of teeth and mum is the word=>me. Read that fat fucking Tolstoy on buses, trains, in airports and in the air. Went to San Diego to help cat- and house-sit. Went deserting. Went to Mexico (briefly). Carried half a pound of sodium chloride from a road-bought (sickness shortening) plastic neti pot through four flights.

The Plan
Step #5: Get Over It

The trash was still there when I got back. I threw it out.




From the beginning, one year ago today.



******************>

2) Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'

I am not sure what will stick, so I'm starting a series of possible addictions. If you have any additional suggestions, or a favorite of the lot you would like to see me hang on to, feel free to interject below.

*Editing Wikipedia Punctuation
*One-a-day pictures: forswe.tumblr.com
*Dates
*Handwritten Anything
*Stomach Muscles
*Green Blankets
*My Watch

The End.